Where do the 736 Players from WC 2010 work?

There are 32 national teams with a total of 736 players at the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa. But, where do they actually work during the year?

This visualization created by the brazilian news resource Estadão.com.br analyzes the composition of all the teams. In the row on top we see the 32 national teams and on the bottom are the clubs where the athletes play during the year.

The tabs above the visualization let us compare the past World Cups. We see that 1994 the distribution was far less than 2010. In 1994 64.8% played in their own country whereas in 2010 only 40.1% play for a club in the country of origin.

If we hover over a flag, we can focus on one single country. We see clear differences between export and import heavy countries. Let’s take Nigeria and Germany as an example. Actually none of the nigerian sportsmen plays for a club based Nigeria, while everyone on the german team plays in Germany throughout the year for a local club.

I think the visualization is understandable (proof: I basically don’t understand a a word of Portuguese) and simple to navigate. The color scheme does a fairly good job at showing the distribution in an unobtrusive way.